Annual test of Swiss emergency sirens a success

Over 5000 sirens wail throughout Switzerland Keystone-SDA

Over 5,000 stationary sirens sounded throughout Switzerland on Wednesday. As with last year's siren test, around 99% of the sirens worked perfectly, according to the Swiss government.

The sirens sounded between 1.30 pm and 4.30 pm, depending on the location. The sirens sounded the general alert at 1.30 pm, a regular ascending and descending wailing tone lasting one minute. The water alert was also tested from 2.00 pm until 4.30 pm in areas close to dams. The signal consists of twelve low continuous tones of 20 seconds each at intervals of 10 seconds.

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The cantons and municipalities are required to repair or replace the defective systems immediately so that they can be maintained at a high level of operational readiness, the Federal Office for Civil Protection announced in the evening following the successful tests. Mobile sirens were also tested in various cantons. These are used to supplement the siren network in sparsely populated areas or when stationary sirens fail.

There were also false alarms during the siren test. In Oberwil bei Büren in the canton of Bern, for example, a siren alarm was falsely triggered in the morning. A false alarm had already been triggered the day before in Suhr in the canton of Aargau. According to the federal government’s Alertswiss app, there was no danger in either case.

Over the course of the day, more than 15 million push notifications were sent, it added. As these were tests, an “Information” level message was sent, which does not generate a siren sound on mobile devices. The Alertswiss app is installed on around 2.3 million mobile devices.

The functionality of the sirens and the Alertswiss app are tested on the first Wednesday in February.

Adapted from German by AI/ac

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